


Bones. Hearts. Minds.

by Kansas42



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Angst, BAMF Stiles, Banshee Lydia Martin, Disassociation, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode Tag, F/M, Friendship, Gen, Kinda Dark, Moral Ambiguity, Moral Dilemmas, Nogitsune Trauma, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Shock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-17
Updated: 2015-07-17
Packaged: 2018-04-09 19:04:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4360757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kansas42/pseuds/Kansas42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lydia is tired of being a victim. Stiles is tired of losing his mind. (Episode tag for 5x04, or pure unlikely speculation for 5x05.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bones. Hearts. Minds.

**Author's Note:**

> I absolutely do not have time to be writing this, and I know it's just going to become an AU in a few days anyway when the next episode airs, knocking it out of continuity. But . . . sometimes you just can't help yourself.
> 
> Spoilers for everything up to 5x04 and the Season Five Supertease. Also, trigger warnings for panic attack symptoms and semi-gruesome dead bodies. (They’re kind of my favorite things. I should really consider writing a Teen Wolf fanfiction where no one has a panic attack . . . nah.)

Lydia’s skin itches.

She could blame the hospital gown. It’s hardly cashmere, rough against her skin, a shapeless blue sack draping open in unwanted places. But it’s not just the gown. It’s the bed. It’s the room. It’s the fact she’s here again, a banshee, a genius, and somehow still a victim.

Banshees are useless in combat. They have no offensive capabilities, no defensive capabilities, no capacity to heal others or themselves. They herald a fight; predict the fallen. Stand on the sidelines. Bury the dead.

Lydia almost died. She almost died again.

But Lydia refuses to die in this town.

#

Her mother’s at home, ostensibly to shower and change into some fresh clothing, although Lydia suspects she actually just needed twenty minutes to breakdown in the privacy of her own home. Mom has a lot to catch up on and, as far as introductions to the supernatural go, watching a lizard-werewolf in the midst of a night terror nearly murder your teenage daughter is not the best way to start out. Though it possibly beats nearly bleeding out on a lacrosse field. Perhaps they’ll compare notes, later.

Mom will have questions, many questions. Lydia doesn’t look forward to answering them.

Parrish left half an hour ago. Exhausted, likely -- he’d been here all day, and she had no idea when he’d last slept. She still wonders about his nightmares, about whose body he’d been carrying to the Nemeton and for what purpose. She wonders, for just a moment, if she can afford to trust him.

But she does trust him, or she wouldn’t have asked for his help teaching her how to fight. She wouldn’t have gone to him in the middle of the night, an Americano in hand. She wouldn’t have spent weeks trying to figure out what he was. Good weeks. Weeks she’d enjoyed, much more than she’d anticipated.

Lydia likes Deputy Parrish, and her skin itches, now that she’s alone.

#

There’s a solution to the problem: she needs out of this room. 

She’s supposed to stay on bed rest for two more days, but perpetual victim or not, Lydia hardly thinks a quick trip to the cafeteria will prove fatal. She tries not to fall into the trap of self-pity, but if ever there was a day when she’d earned a sweet indulgence from the vending machine, well. She wants Starbursts or chocolate pretzels. She will not be denied.

Getting past the nurses’ station is pathetically simple. It helps that Scott’s mother has gone home, and that the hospital is nearly deserted this time of night. They must run on a skeleton crew, or else they simply haven’t filled the positions since last year’s massacre. Hardly a surprise: being a medical professional, police officer, teacher, or teenager in this town seems to have a mortality rate of at least 50%. It’s a wonder anyone lives here at all.

Lydia takes the elevator downstairs and a left down the hallway. Another left, then a right, and then she’s --

Not in the cafeteria.

She’s not in the hospital at all, actually. She’s leaving it, walking towards the road in only her shapeless sack of a hospital gown and bare feet. She thinks, _Not again, not another one_.

But she keeps going because her skin itches less with every step she takes.

#

By the time Lydia reaches the Preserve, her feet have started to bleed. She doesn’t feel it, which isn’t a good sign. Someone must be looking for her by now. Her mother’s never going to leave her alone in the hospital again. On the positive side, Lydia knows what’s happening to her this time. She isn’t in a total fugue state. She also isn’t naked.

None of this means much when she sees Stiles’s perpetually broken down Jeep parked far off the road.

Her breath catches in her throat, but there’s no power thrumming inside her, no scream waiting to be released. She knows, somehow, that whatever’s happened -- well, it’s already happened. Destiny is set. Fate has been decreed. No death will be prevented today. She’s only the herald, the witness. The seeker of dead things.

Stiles can’t be a dead thing. He can’t, not without some kind of prior warning: a whisper in her ear, a voice on the radio. Stiles is Stiles; he can’t be a body, not like Tracy’s father, not like the man at the gas station. He’s not even like the rest of the pack; Lydia is connected to him in a way that she just isn’t to the others. She is his anchor, his tether to the mortal world. She is the thing that once brought him back from the dead.

Always, always Lydia has a chance to save Stiles. That can’t have changed, not now. Lydia refuses to die in this town, and she refuses to lose another friend without a fight.

_You don’t care about getting hurt, but you know how I’ll feel? I’ll be devastated. And if you die, I will literally go out of my freaking mind_.

She hadn’t really believed him, back then. You always think you can’t live without someone, and then they die anyway, and the world just keeps on going. Allison had taught her that. Aiden, too. But the way he’d looked at her last night, the way he’d frozen stock-still in the doorway -- she’d begun to wonder. She’d wondered how many hits you could take and keep on moving.

Every single thing has a breaking point. Glass. Bones. Hearts. Minds.

Lydia forces herself forward, slowly, walking to the Jeep on her bloody feet. Her skin doesn’t itch anymore, but her fingers tremble. She’s holding her breath. If she finds him, she doesn’t think that will help. She’ll panic. She’ll scream, as banshees do. She prays she won’t find him.

She does. But he’s _alive_.

He’s sitting in the driver’s seat, pale and shaking, and his hands -- his hands are covered in blood. It takes him a long moment to register her presence, and he turns his head just as she looks behind him.

There is the dead body she’s come for, lying still and silent across his backseat.

#

They stare at each other for a long moment, Lydia and Stiles. His eyes are a little glassy, and she sees him glance down at his bloody hands, his fingers jerking slightly one by one. It takes her a moment to realize that he’s counting them.

He closes his eyes when he reaches ten. Opens them. Reaches for the door handle and hesitates when Lydia, involuntarily, flinches and steps back. 

He rolls down the window instead.

“Hey, Lyds,” Stiles says, his voice quiet, breaking. “You really shouldn’t be here.” He blinks, and then laughs. “Wow, that totally sounded like something a serial killer would say. Sorry. Sorry, I just meant. Are you okay? Shouldn’t you still be at the hospital?”

He sounds so sincere about it, so absurdly concerned about her health despite the current circumstances that Lydia can suddenly breathe again. She arches her very best unimpressed eyebrow. “You have a dead body in your backseat, Stiles,” she says, and to her credit, her voice only shakes a little. “Let’s not worry about me right now.”

Stiles nods, or maybe twitches. “It’s Donovan,” he says. “He, he tried -- I was at the library, the parking lot. He came up from behind me, and his, his _hand_ \-- he tried to kill me. He tried to kill me.”

He says it’s like it’s somehow surprising, like people don’t regularly try to kill them every week. She understands, though; after all, the dead body in the backseat is very new.

“He’s not human,” Stiles continues. “He was, he _was_ human, but I think the men with the masks, I think they changed him. A chimera, like Tracy, but not, not a kanima. Wendigo, maybe. Seriously, Lydia, his _hand_ , it was like. He bit me, I think he bit me with it.”

Lydia doesn’t ask about the men with the masks. Clearly, she has some catching up to do, but now doesn’t seem like the appropriate moment. Instead, she presses up against the car door, peers closer at Donovan. She doesn’t have the right angle to see either of his hands, but she can see the multiple holes in his chest and his face . . . it’s a bloody disaster, torn up and ruined. Even if she’d met him before he died, she’s not sure she’d be able to recognize him.

The left side of his head is caved in. Clinically, Lydia notes that she can see gray matter.

She looks back to Stiles. He’s shaking pretty hard now, his fingers reflexively gripping the steering wheel like it’s the only thing keeping him together. His skin is bone white, too pale even for him, and there’s sweat on his forehead. It’s not warm out. Lydia’s whole body, marginally covered in the paper-thin hospital gown, is evidence of this.

She reaches through the open window and rests the back of her hand against his cheek, like she’s checking for a fever. His skin is clammy to the touch; clearly, he’s going into shock. “Come on,” she says, struggling to keep her voice even. “Come out of there. Let me have a look at you.”

Stiles just stares at her, blinking slowly, like he forgot she was real, like he forgot there were things that could touch him. She doesn’t have time right now for his obvious PTSD. Her banshee-fueled adrenaline got her to the Preserve, but it’s fading fast, and her body _hurts_. A glance tells her that she hasn’t ripped open her stitches yet, miraculously, but staring contests in the middle of the woods are just not on the table anymore.

She yanks open the door and sighs when he topples out of the Jeep with a muffled yelp, landing on hands and knees. She eases herself down next to him and is probably not as gentle as she ought to be when she roughly pulls his shirt this way and that, examining his body for breaks. Under his sleeves are multiple defensive marks, long scratches and newly formed purple and black bruises, trailing up and down his arms.

His shoulder is worse, blood still sluggishly dripping down his back. The wound is dark and ugly, an unfathomable bite. It almost looks like . . . like a _lamprey_ bite. It needs medical attention. He should be at the hospital. They both should be.

“God, Stiles,” Lydia whispers, just as Stiles says, “Jesus, your _feet_. You _walked_ all the way from the hospital? I have to, I have to get you -- “

He looks back up at his car and presumably remembers Donovan’s dead body. He deflates.

“Stiles,” Lydia says carefully. “If it was self-defense . . . why are you here?”

Stiles doesn’t have the steering wheel to white-knuckle anymore, so he digs his fingers compulsively in the dirt instead.

“The chimeras,” he says, “or -- or whatever they are, they’re not changing back. To human form, I mean, and you know that’s going to be a problem eventually. Like, I think the coroner’s office is only going to accept ‘random genetic mutation’ so many times before they give up and admit something hinky is in the water. And they’ll. They’ll _know_.” Stiles swallows hard, like he’s going to be sick. “The pieces aren’t hard to put together, once they’re staring you in the face. They’ll know about -- about you, about Scott and Kira , about -- “

“No,” Lydia says.

Stiles blinks at her. “No?”

“No,” Lydia says. “That’s not why you’re here.”

Banshees aren’t psychics. She can’t read anyone’s mind, but she doesn’t need to because she knows Stiles. She can read his twitching fingers, his shock-induced stutter, the accidental twist of his lips when he fails a reassuring smile. Lydia’s seen that smile a lot lately. He wears it as often as one of his offensively plaid shirts.

Everything has a breaking point, and she thinks Stiles has been secretly tipping at his for the past year.

Stiles is human, the only human member in the pack, and she knows that, in theory, he’s more vulnerable than any of them. But she also knows that he’s the one who always puts things together, the one who always figures things out. Stiles is the one to consider what needs to be done instead of just what _should_ be done. And she knows, she knows, that Stiles is tired of being a victim, too.

“Scott doesn’t know you’re here,” Lydia says, and she doesn’t insult him by making it a question. “Neither does your dad, Deaton, anyone. Stiles, you’re not hiding Donovan from the coroner.”

Stiles doesn’t say anything for a while. Each breath he takes is long and shuddering. He tries to meet her eyes but can’t.

“I tried to get away,” he says finally. “Get to Scott. Get help. But I couldn’t. Sometimes, you can’t. Sometimes, you have to deal with stuff on your own, and I’m. I’m not like Scott. I don’t need to save people from themselves. I don’t care where the bad guys came from, why they are how they are. Tracy was a victim, but Donovan, he -- he wanted to kill my _dad_. He didn’t need crazy sharp hand-teeth to do it. Scott, he thinks everyone deserves to be saved, but I -- I don’t care what’s right, I just. I just want us to survive.”

Lydia doesn’t know what to say to that. On one hand, she thinks that maybe it’s not a great idea for a group of hormone-riddled, supernatural teenagers to be serving as judge, jury, and executioner. On the other hand, Scott’s wrong. Not everyone deserves to be saved. Peter didn’t. 

She wasn’t in Mexico, when Scott defeated Peter and chose to contain him rather than kill him. If the choice had been up to her . . .

It’s never been up to her. She’s never been the pack’s leader. She doesn’t know what choice she’d make.

But she has a good idea.

“How did you do it?” Lydia asks because she thinks how might be easier than why, right now.

Stiles drops his head back to rest on the Jeep behind him. He’s staring out into the woods, out into nothing. Everything about him is far, far away. 

“I’ve been kind of . . . collecting stuff?” Stiles says. His fingers keep moving in the dirt. “Like, it turns out that it’s not really hard to get a gun, even when your dad’s the Sheriff. You just have to know who to ask, and I know, I know things I didn’t used to. Things, things _Stiles_ didn’t need to know.” 

He laughs, even as tears trickle down his cheeks. Lydia takes his hand and pretends she isn’t disturbed by the disassociation. She understands it, after all, remembers what it was like alone in her own head after Peter had been inside it, how afraid she’d been that he’d left pieces of himself behind.

“Tell me,” Lydia says, but she says it in Japanese, a language she doesn’t speak fluently . . . yet. Once you’ve mastered Ancient Latin, you no longer doubt your gift with languages.

“I know how to make bombs,” Stiles tells her quietly. “How to play Go. The best angle to twist a sword; inflict the most pain with the smallest effort. I _didn’t_ know where to get wolfsbane bullets, but a quick text to Chris helped with that. Helped me get a lot of stuff, actually: mountain ash, smoke grenades, ultrasonic emitters, even a cattle prod. That last one helped with Donovan. Gun didn’t do much; guess there wasn’t any dogboy in his recipe. But my bat, my bat really helped.”

Lydia has tried his bat before. “I wasn’t impressed.”

“Modified it.” 

Stiles is nearly expressionless, but he still jerks occasionally, like someone’s poking _him_ with a cattle prod. His breath keeps hitching. “I ran,” he says. “Got away for a minute, but my phone fell, broke. I’ve really got to stop killing those things. Dad’s not going to keep buying them, right? But I, I circled back to the Jeep. It was still stalled out, but all the stuff, I had everything in the back so when he came, I was, I was ready.

“He said he was going to kill me first, so that Dad, Dad would know it was all his fault, and when he tried, when he was, when he was ready to kill himself, Donovan would be there, waiting. He said he’d make sure it was slow, that Dad, he felt every second of it, and I just. There’s only so many people, you know. You can only stand to lose so many people before you just. Can’t. And Donovan jumped at me, and I swung the bat, and I just. I kept on swinging it.

“Dad. Dad thinks there’s a line. You just can’t cross this line, but I think -- I think we just keep making new ones, and I’m not sorry. I’m not sorry for what I did, cause my line, it’s always been left of theirs, Dad’s and Scott’s. I know I’ve always been, I’ve never been _good_. But now, now it’s so much farther left. Maybe it’s not my line at all, maybe it’s _his_. And I don’t want them to look at me, at _Stiles_ , the way they looked at _him_. I don’t want _you_ \-- “

Lydia squeezes his hand. He doesn’t squeeze hers back.

“Do you know what I see,” Lydia asks, “when I look at you?”

Stiles shakes his head, mouth slightly open, turning to stare at her like he trusts her to heal him or break him, like her word is law and he’ll accept whatever judgment she sees fit to place on his head.

It pisses her off.

“I just see you, Stiles. I don’t see a monster. I don’t see a hero. I see my friend. I see someone else who’s just trying to survive. You want me to condemn you? Punish you? I’m not going to do that. You solve problems. You help your friends. You cross lines. You want me to tell you where the right lines are? You want absolution? I can’t give you that. We all have to figure out how to forgive ourselves for the things we’ve done and the things that were done to us.”

Now Stiles’s fingers clench around hers. “Lydia -- “

“I look at you,” Lydia says, ignoring him, “and I see someone who’d die to protect me. I see someone I’d kill to protect. I’m not like Scott, either, Stiles, which I’d like to think you’re smart enough to notice. I don’t know if you crossed the line between self-defense and murder. Maybe. Probably. But I’m just glad you made it. I’m glad I didn’t come here for you. Beyond that . . .” She shrugs. “I don’t care. You’re my friend, maybe my best friend. All I see is my friend who seriously needs to stop pretending he doesn’t need therapy.”

He chokes out a laugh that’s also a sob, and she hugs him, gently, trying to be careful of his back. He breathes into her shoulder for a long minute and then pulls away, looking her over again. Abruptly, he stands up, walking around his Jeep and coming back with a long-sleeved plaid shirt.

Lydia does _not_ wear orange plaid, but everyone’s crossing lines, these days.

Stiles frowns at her feet again. “You shouldn’t -- can I pick you up?”

She arches an eyebrow at him. “Can you?”

He can, apparently. He lifts her into the passenger seat and wipes the blood and dirt away from her toes, bandaging her feet and ankles with supplies from the first aid kid that he apparently now keeps with his weapons and extra shirts. She sees the modified baseball bat. It has nails and pieces of glass sticking out of it. She wonders if they’ve been dipped in any kind of poison. If she’d had one, she’d dip hers in kanima venom. Maybe wolfsbane, too.

Near the modified baseball bat is a standard issue shovel.

“So,” Lydia says, bandaging Stiles’s back now. “What are you going to do with Donovan?”

Stiles twitches under her fingers, but his breathing is finally steady, or close to.

“He’s dead,” Stiles says finally. “I can’t fix that, no one can, and I’d rather. I still don’t want them to know.” 

He turns around to look at her. She meets his eyes.

“Okay,” Lydia says, and rests a hand on his good shoulder.

#

They say friends help you move; real friends help you move bodies. Neither has been true in Lydia’s experience. Her friends have mostly helped her _find_ bodies. It’s not true, tonight, either, because Lydia’s too tapped out to move anything. She can’t even lift her own weight right now. Also, she just got her nails done two days ago.

Instead, she sits sideways in the passenger seat with her bare legs dangling through the open door and talks quietly to Stiles as he digs, about Stanford, about gossip, about less malevolent supernatural creatures she’d like to meet. Humiliatingly, he remembers her unicorn obsession in the fourth grade. 

Once, though, right after Stiles has dropped Donovan’s body in the ground, he says, “I’d do it again. I don’t want to scare you, but I think you should know. I can do it again. And I think I might have to, before this is all through.”

Maybe Lydia should be scared, but she’s not. She’s just not. Parrish isn’t the only person she trusts.

“Call me next time,” she says. “I’ll bring our college applications.”

Because it’s one thing she’s sure of: they’re both getting the hell out of this town.

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, now I need to get back to the writing I’m supposed to be doing. I’m so into this season, though. Like, massively into this season.
> 
> Also, halfway through writing this, I got the idea, ‘OR Stiles could dump the body somewhere and leave, and Lydia could find it hours later, and then the pack would try to solve the mystery of who killed him while Stiles is trying to hide what he’s done. THAT could be fun.’ And then I was like, ‘Oh my God, shut up, brain. Stay on target. STAY ON TARGET.’


End file.
